1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method to transfer data in a telecommunication network between a first host and a second host via Standard Toolkit Software Components, a Client Side HTTP Session Manager associated to said first host, a Transport medium and a Server Side HTTP Session Manager associated to said second host, said Transport medium being adapted to transmit data from said Client Side HTTP Session Manager to said Server Side HTTP Session Manager, said data transfer being compliant with the Simple Object Access Protocol SOAP 1.2 HTTP Bindings Specification, and comprising a first SOAP Request sent by said first host into a first HTTP Request message towards said Client Side HTTP Session Manager, as well as a first SOAP Response sent by said second host as reply to said first HTTP Request message into a first HTTP Response message towards said Server Side HTTP Session Manager.
2. Description of the Related Art
Such a method to transfer data in a telecommunication network, as shown at FIG. 1, is already generally known in the art.
SOAP [Simple Object Access Protocol] is widely used in the context of Web Services in the IT world. SOAP 1.2 HTTP [HyperText Transfer Protocol HTTP] Bindings Specification, for instance, is very popular and standardized for communication between distributed applications. Furthermore, Web Services have recently been standardized by the Web Services Interoperability organization WS-I in the Basic Profile 1.0.
As a result, many Toolkits and APIs (e.g. Apache™ AXIS [Apache eXtensible Interaction System] library) are developed for automating Web Services applications by providing:                Automated serialization/de-serialization to the object model (java/C++);        Use of a WSDL [Web Service Description Language] file that clearly specifies the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) interface between distributed applications and reduces programming errors;        Source Code generation from WSDL (Client Side);        WSDL generation from the object model (Server Side);        Built-in Session management of the web service through the use of Web Services Deployment Descriptor; and        Automated mapping from Exceptions in the object model to SOAP Faults        
The Web Service Session management software provided by such Toolkits can be configured to run over several transport protocols among which HTTP is the most popular one.
To improve interoperability between peer applications when HTTP is used, the Session management software, and thus the Toolkits, requires compliance with SOAP 1.2 HTTP Bindings Specification that requires that a “SOAP Request” be sent in a “HTTP Request message” and a “SOAP Response” is received in a “HTTP Response message”, as shown at FIG. 1.
However, when a HTTP Session is established through the transport medium between two hosts, SOAP 1.2 HTTP Bindings Specification specifies that a SOAP Request must be sent in a HTTP Request message and a SOAP Response must be received in a HTTP Response message. This implies that in a single HTTP Session, the Remote Procedure Call RPC exchange flow is unidirectional; only the HTTP initiator, the one that posts HTTP Request messages, can issue RPC Requests.
Although both HTTP target and initiator applications could theoretically handle SOAP RPCs in one single HTTP Session, they cannot be developed for using standard Toolkits because the SOAP Session management software provided by those Toolkits only expects unidirectional exchanges of SOAP Requests per established HTTP Session.